Underage Drinking

Underage Drinking

The main issue in today’s society is underage drinking. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this subject. Although there may be many different opinions regarding legal drinking age, they can all be divided into two different categories: people who believe it should remain at 21+ and people who believe it should be lowered. There are some people who believe that the drinking age should be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen years old as it was during the Vietnam war. The old-school mentality was “old enough to fight, old enough to drink.” The con side disagrees however stating that lowering the drinking age would bring about a rise in traffic accidents, and encourage young adults to binge drink. My understanding of the pro side is that they feel by lowering the drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen or nineteen it would then reduce the amount of binge drinkers in college aged students, and help teach people to drink responsibly (Holder, 2003).
The pro side makes the argument that if the drinking age was lowered young adults would be less likely to binge drink. They feel as though young adults should be able to drink in the presence of adults, or in bars or taverns. If young adults were allowed to “learn” to drink in a safe and controlled environment they would be less likely to lose control. The pro side believes that our current approach to stop underage drinking is not working, and in fact it’s doing the exact opposite. The law doesn’t stop young adults from consuming alcohol. It is still quite easy for someone underage to obtain alcohol from older friends and family members or by the use of a fake ID.
The con side takes quite a different stance on underage drinking. They believe the concept of “binge drinking” does not start at the uniform age of twenty-one. When the legal age of drinking was eighteen and over during the Vietnam War the number one leading cause of deaths for people younger than twenty-one was alcohol related traffic accidents....